Hellish Fiends, and Brutish Men

When he died in the winter of 1800-1801, Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade had been an ally to the British in North America for forty years. Such an outcome would not have occurred when he first stepped onto the pages of history.
Langlade was a Métis; his mother, Domitilde, was the daughter of an Odawa (or Ottawa) war chief and the sister to another. His father, Augustin Mouet, sieur de Langlade, a French Canadian from Trois-Rivières, had, along with his son, been chiefly responsible for establishing a fur trading settlement where the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin, now stands.
Langlade participated in some of the most well-known engagements in the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War in parts of North America). He was at Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela, crossed swords with the famous Ranger Captain Robert Rogers at the First Battle on Snowshoes, had taken part in the siege of Fort William Henry and its infamous aftermath and was also present at the final significant act of the war —the siege of Quebec.
In 1747, Memeskia (Dragonfly), a Piankashaw chief, known to the French as La Demoiselle (The Young Lady) and to the British as Old Briton, led a group of his tribespeople east from present-day Indiana to the site of the modern city of Piqua, Ohio.
The Piankashaw were members of the Miami tribe who lived apart from the rest of the Miami Nation. When Europeans arrived in the area during the 1600s, the Piankashaw lived along the south-central Wabash River. In 1743, the Piankashaw were to be found along the Vermillion River, a tributary of the Wabash.
Memeskia established the settlement of Pickawillany near the confluence of Loramie Creek and the Great Miami River in the Ohio Valley. Three years later, in 1750, British traders from Pennsylvania were permitted to build a trading post and stockade on the site. By this time, Memeskia had chosen to ally himself with the British against the advice of the French, who were disturbed by the presence of their traditional adversaries in the area.
The year before the British traders had moved to Pickawillany, the governor of New France, Charles de la Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois, had become concerned by the new alliances between the British and the natives. In the summer of 1749, Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville set out with a contingent of 270 men on his so-called ‘Lead Plate Expedition’.
Céloron had been in the military since 1713. He served as lieutenant commandant at Michilimackinac before being sent south to fight the Chickasaw Nation in Louisiana. Céloron returned from the south and served at Detroit, Fort Niagara, and Fort St. Frédéric during King George’s War (1743-1748).
Before reaching Pickawillany on 13 September, the expedition, which included the Jesuit priest Father Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamps, visited Kittanning and Logstown, where Céloron ordered British traders encountered there to leave—also, sending a coruscating letter to the governor of Pennsylvania. Céloron’s supercilious attitude alienated many of the Iroquois who had accompanied the party, and they returned home.
At Lower Shawneetown on the Scioto River, the French party once more met with British traders, and Céloron summoned them to a meeting and insisted that they leave, telling them that they ‘had no right to trade or aught else on the river’. Most of the traders paid no heed to Céloron’s haughty demands.
As they travelled, the party buried lead plates in several locations, including on the Muskingum River and at the mouth of the Kanawha River. The plates were inscribed with the following:

In the year 1749, of the reign of Louis the 15th, King of
France, we Céloron, commander of a detachment sent by
Monsieur the Marquis de la Galissoniere, Governor General of
New France, to reestablish tranquility in some Indian villages of
these cantons, have buried this Plate of Lead at the confluence
of the Ohio and the Chadakoin, this 29th day of July, near the
river Ohio, otherwise Belle Riviere, as a monument of the renewal
of the possession we have taken of the said river Ohio
and of all those which empty into it, and of all the lands on
both sides as far as the sources of the said rivers, as enjoyed
or ought to have been enjoyed by the kings of France preceding
and as they have there maintained themselves by arms and by
treaties, especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht and Aix-la-Chapelle.

Céloron camped for a week at Pickawillany; once again, he met with Britons. Encountering two soldiers, he sent them away. The meetings with La Demoiselle were cordial, and the Piankashaw promised that he would consider returning to the French orbit and return to the area around Detroit. After reaching Detroit, Céloron noted glumly that ‘the nations of these localities are very badly disposed towards the French, and are entirely devoted to the English.’
When he left on the expedition, the Jesuit Father Bonnecamps was serving as a professor of hydrography at the Collège de Québec. He acted as chaplain, hydrographer, and historian on the Lead Plate Expedition. He is credited with compiling the first map of the Ohio Valley.
It was only a few months after Céloron and his cohort had left Pickawillany and returned to Detroit when George Croghan, an Irish-born fur trader, arrived at the settlement and received permission from Memeskia to build a trading post.
When the French became aware of George Croghan’s presence at Pickawillany, they offered a reward for him and another man, the interpreter Andrew Montour.
The following year, the Pennsylvania Provincial Council requested permission to build a fortification strong enough to withstand an assault by a hostile force.
William Trent was a fur trader and merchant who was, during the early stages of the French and Indian War, commissioned as a captain in the Virginia Regiment, where he served with George Washington. Trent visited Pickawillany and described the site: ‘the erection of a stockade …in case of sudden attack…It was surrounded by a high wall of split logs and three gateways.’
Trent added that a well had been dug within the enclosure, which supplied enough water during spring, autumn, and winter ‘but failed in summer’. He said Pickawillany was home to ‘four hundred Indian families…and the Miami Confederacy’s principal chief.’
Another trader, John Patten, visited in November 1750 to trade with natives on the St. Marys River, a tributary of the Maumee in present-day northwestern Ohio and northeastern Indiana. He described Pickawillany as home to 200 warriors, including ‘those who left the French…in order to trade with the English.’
Christopher Gist, the surveyor, and explorer who in the not-too-distant future would be credited with saving George Washington’s life, was at Pickawillany in February of 1751 when a party of four Odawa men sent as emissaries of the French arrived and held a council with Memeskia at which both the French and British flags were flown.
The Odawa presented their hosts with gifts and requested that Memeskia return to the French fold. After listening patiently to the message sent from the French, Memeskia got to his feet and responded, ‘You are always differing with the French yourselves, and yet you listen to what they say…we will not hear anything they say to us, nor do anything they bid us.’
The following day, the Odawa left Pickawillany, and Christopher Gist and George Croghan concluded a treaty with Memeskia. A further conference followed three months later at Logstown, in which Croghan distributed more gifts, further strengthening the alliance between the British and the natives of the Ohio Valley.
Disturbed by Memeskia’s disinterest in restoring his former alliance with the French, the governor of New France, the Marquis de la Jonquière, sent out a punitive force under François-Marie Picoté de Belestre to raid Pickawillany.
However, Belestre’s raid failed; when his force reached the Piankashaw village, they found it nearly deserted; most of the inhabitants were away hunting. The Attacking force, made up mainly of natives, had to be satisfied by the capture of two British traders and the slaying of a Miami man and woman.
On returning from the hunt, Memeskia had three French prisoners put to death; a fourth man had his ears cut off and was sent back as a warning to Jonquière.
The Marquis de la Jonquière died the following year as he was in the throes of preparing another force with which to attack Pickawillany. Informants reported to Jonquière’s successor, the Marquis de Longueuil, that there were just 140 men of fighting age at Pickawillany and ‘two English among them without canon or artillery’.
The deputy governor of Pennsylvania, James Hamilton, was informed in May of 1752 that the French were planning a further assault on Pickawillany. Hamilton was not convinced that the French would strike again; he stated that he had received no other reports and pointed out that he would need the approval of the Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Provincial Council to send arms to aid the natives at Pickawillany if such statements concerning a French advance on the settlement at Pickawillany should prove to be correct, Hamilton knew that the Council would never agree to supply the Piankashaw with weapons. As a result, no help was provided, and the Piankashaw were left to fend for themselves.
Throughout the winter of 1751-1752, the ambitious Charles Langlade sought to assemble a force of warriors from the pays d’en haut (Upper Country) west of Montreal. He recruited from his fellow Odawa and enlisted Ojibwe and Potawatomi warriors. Langlade also ventured beyond Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron to enrol Odawa men.
Langlade persuaded the Odawa to join him by characterising the attack on Pickawillany as a gesture of friendship towards the Governor of New France. Since the reign of Charles Jacques Huault de Montmagny, the governor was known to the tribes around the Great Lakes region as Onontio. Onontio was used for each subsequent governor of New France until the British conquest in 1763. Onontio is a Mohawk rendering of ‘great mountain’, the folk etymology translation of Montmagny.
On reaching Detroit at the beginning of June, 30 of Langlade’s Odawa allies deserted on hearing rumours that smallpox had broken out amongst the Miami; the pays d’en haut, the area from which many of Langlade’s cohort came, was riddled with smallpox. The prevalence of smallpox in the Upper Country had greatly restricted earlier attempts to raise a force to attack the Piankashaw at Pickawillany.
Shrugging off the loss of the Odawa men that had deserted at Detroit and had presumably returned to their homes in the pays d’en haut, Langlade and the rest of his force, numbering between 200-300 men, reached Pickawillany in the early morning of 21 June.
As with the Belestre sally, again, large numbers of the men were away hunting. Langlade’s force launched a lightning attack on the village, catching some of the women in the cornfields outside of the palisaded walls of the town.
The Piankashaw and traders were caught outside the village when the attacking force struck and raced for the enclosure. Three British traders could not reach the village and found safety in a cabin just outside the walls. The other traders adequately supplied them with firearms, and their comrades behind the stockade shouted encouragement.
The traders surrendered the cabin without raising a musket in their defence. The traders informed Charles Langlade that there were only twenty fighting men within Pickawillany.
The men from the pays d’en haut found cover in the cabins outside of the stockade and poured a withering fire into the defenders ensconced in relative safety behind the stout walls of the enclosure.
A stalemate ensued; the defenders were secure behind the fortification while the attackers outnumbered them. The French laid out a proposal that met with agreement from the Piankashaw. If they agreed to surrender the British traders, Langlade and his men would return the prisoners they had captured outside the stockade’s walls, leave the village, and return to their own country.
The defenders ran out of water; one Briton had been wounded in the stomach, and some other men were also injured. They had a counter-proposal: don’t harm the traders, and the fort and all trade goods would be surrendered by its defenders. Langlade accepted the terms.
Neither side proved willing to live up to the agreement. The Piankashaw gave up five traders; they hid two more men, including a blacksmith provided by George Croghan a few months before. The Odawa stabbed the trader, who had received a wound to his stomach, scalped, and his heart was cut out by the Odawa and eaten by the warriors in an act of atonement for the death of Odawa warriors during the attack on the village. The two traders hidden in Pickawillany, Thomas Burney and Andrew McBryer, escaped the village at night, taking the news of the attack on Pickawillany to the British authorities.
Memeskia, the cause of so much consternation amongst the French for his support of the British, was boiled and ritually cannibalised by the Odawa. Burney and McBryer reported that six people had been killed in the village. Other sources suggest that fourteen Piankashaw were slain.
The attackers left Pickawillany with trade goods valued at £300 and returned to Detroit with the five remaining traders. Most of the Piankashaw left Pickawillany with Langlade and returned to their previous homes along the Wabash, back within the orbit of the French. Memeskia’s wife and son were freed by Langlade and sought sanctuary among the Shawnee on the Scioto River, where William Trent encountered them a short time later.
The five traders captured during the raid were carried from Pickawillany to Quebec before being sent across the Atlantic to La Rochelle, where the British Ambassador procured their release. From England, they returned to the American colonies.
Thomas Burney, the Pickawillany blacksmith, who had managed to evade capture during the night, was killed at the 1755 battle on the Monongahela, another episode in which Langlade was a prominent player.